Yup...it's like I mentioned above..these types of threads become "religious wars" in the tone of the debate.

Leo said it best. He bought components based on "cost". When a certain type of wood became too expensive, he used another type.

-T

_________________
-T

"You can't spend what you ain't got, you can't lose what you ain't never had" ~ McKinley Morganfield

Actually this quote in not only overboard but grossly untrue. The guitar from the tip of the head to the base of the body resonates like a big drum head. It a situation much like a high powered rifle. In looking at a steel rifle barrel it looks sturdy and difficult to bend. However under slow motion photography when the rifle is fired the barrel flexes along several axis like a spagetti noodle..

I have several Stratocasters Alder, Ash, Korean plywood squires, and only god know what the squire bullets are made of, pine? I think. They all sound very different. Almost everything effects the way the a string resonates. If it were not so we would all be happy with squire bullets.

Thre is no need to become ugly and insulting just becase you have a different opinion.

[/quote]

_________________
I remember when we were free!

Apply said active pickups to said countertop and viola.

The reason those pups are sealed in epoxy: Magic!!

Or somesuch other sinister goings on..

I call shenanigans, sir!

_________________
60th Anniversary AD Strat, Deluxe Nashville Tele, Player's P Bass. Mesa/Boogie Mk IV combo, Marshall JCM800, 1960A cab, Genz Benz El Diablo 60, Genz 2x12" cab, too many neat little practice amps and kit projects!

How does the "wood doesn't effect tone" crowd explain an ES335? Shouldn't it sound just like a Les Paul? But it doesn't. How the heck do you explain an archtop jazz guitar, with its dark, warm tone? You can use the same pickup as a Les Paul, and it's an entirely different tone. Larry Carlton isn't going to start playing an acrylic guitar anytime soon. He knows that his sound comes from a mahogany core, with laminated maple top bottom and sides, and extra warmth provided by a piece of spruce between the mahogany core and the laminated maple top. And he knows that his particular ES335 sounds a little better than any other he's tried.

Put a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates on a Martin D35. It's going to sound a hell of a lot like an acoustic guitar. Same pickup on a solid chunk of mahogany ....you're talking SG.

Take a piece of pine and rap it with a hammer.

Now, take a piece of oak and rap it with a hammer.

Now, take a piece of hollowed out oak and rap it with a hammer.

Different tone each time. And let's assume that each board has been cut to a length that allows it to resonate at the same frequency.

Now, rig a string on each piece of wood and tune it to E. Rap each piece and it will cause the string to vibrate. Differently. All are E, but the overtones are different....different tone.

Put a pickup on each piece. Each pickup will faithfully reproduce the tonal character of the piece of wood via the vibrating string. And the sustain characteristics.

With regard to, how can a vibrating string cause the wood to vibrate and the wood cause the string to vibrate? Think about it. Whether you rap the wood and cause the string to vibrate or pluck the string to make the string vibrate, the string and wood have to be considered to be a single vibrating unit. Obviously, it's more efficient to pluck the string.

C'mon, not all Les Pauls with identical circuitry sound alike. Ditto for Strats and Teles. It's the wood.

And don't forget, steel sustain block vs. whatever goofy metals Fender has used in their sustain blocks. Different materials...different sound. If you can't hear the difference between materials in a sustain block?!?!?!

Wood's going to matter more to some players than others. If you're playing clean, the character of the wood is more noticeable. Add overdrive, delay, and some fuzz, and you've doctored your sound to the point where the wood will matter less.

I'm not arguing that wood's the only thing that matters, but it's part of the mix, along with strings, pickups, amp, tubes, speakers, and speaker enclosure, etc.

This is obviously a case for Big Jay.

The test subjects must be 5 or more stratocasters of varying progeny; US, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, etc...

All guitars must then be stripped to bare wood and refinished using the same process, preferably robotically, with a predictable constant thickness of all phases of paintwork from sealer to clear coat.

Next, all of the guitars must be fitted with identical hardware. Bridges, tuners, pickguards, nut, right down to the strap buttons in order to ensure that no potmetal sullies the results of this experiments.

As a control device, a replica of a 62 strat will be made from enriched plutonium and the strings wound of strontium-6. The end result will be a compromise of fissible material with pulse-ion fuel, this creating something akin to perpetual motion (well, energy really), however the instrument will be somewhere in the area of the temperature of the surface of the sun. Not sure how to fix that one, need more experts!

Finally, the guitars must all be wired with idential pickups, wound by the same person on the same day while in the same emotional state so that there are as few deviations in the outcome as possible.

Now, using the "Strumming device" Jay perfected for sustain tests, I recommend the use of an applause-o-meter to measure the dynamic effect achieved in addition to a standard dBa meter.

My scientific predictions based on this disciplined test are as follows:

1. Plywood will never impart as good a sound as solid wood, regardless of whether the solid wood body is a single or multiple pieces.

2. Not every player will like the color chosen and some will even leave mad at the thought that nobody wanted to buy a whole pint of razzberry paint to shoot one guitar.

3. Some will love the identically made pickups unconditionally and some will only like them in certain guitars and some will hate them, period.

4. Active pickups would have made all these guitars sound the same, but the vatican outlawed the use of them for this experiment after my previous post.

5. If there is not pizza and beer in suffucient quantities, all the musicians will get bored and leave. Hence the strumming machine. :Mrgreen:

6. All critics assembled will admit to a "variable of some sort" that they can't quite put their finger on, and upon making that conclusion, all will leave (preferably before the control guitar achieves critical mass), their previous conceptions unchanged.

The ending point of this epic exercise will be that nobody agrees on anything and all continue to believe their own assumptions to be correct.

Right then. This mini white paper has just negated the need for the above laborious testing and all may go back to merrily reading and posting on the strat forum! Thanks and

Cheers!

_________________
60th Anniversary AD Strat, Deluxe Nashville Tele, Player's P Bass. Mesa/Boogie Mk IV combo, Marshall JCM800, 1960A cab, Genz Benz El Diablo 60, Genz 2x12" cab, too many neat little practice amps and kit projects!

Siamese,

I would bet they all own fairly expensive guitars, like american standards and deluxes instead of squire bullets or first acts or plywood Epiphone's. why spend all that money on a American Deluxe and just get a $110.00 Squire Bullet and change the pickups?

That is not to say that one cannot make a electric guitar out of other materials and get a adequate sound. But given the extreme volumes and effects panels that most players use it might not make a big difference to the ear at that point. And at that point the inner ear is in such a state of shock there is not much it can distinguish.

_________________
I remember when we were free!

4. Active pickups would have made all these guitars sound the same, but the vatican outlawed the use of them for this experiment after my previous post.


Huh? I can tell you first hand that an active pu will sound different in different guitars.

I changed my pu's to active in my Ventura, and was disappointed as the guitar sounded almost exactly like it did before the swap. In addition, my ESP has the exact same pu in the bridge, yet sounds different than the Ventura, with everything else being equal. Even the woods are essentially the same, all maple with a RW fingerboard...yet they sound different.

The ESP is rounder and fuller sounding, and the Ventura is tighter, brighter and more focused sounding. The big difference is contruction. THe Ventura has a fixed bridge, and a bolt-on neck. The Ventura has has a double locking FR floating bridge and neck-thru construction. Also, the Ventura has 24.75 scale and the ESP is 25.

The guitars construction is probably the single biggest factor to its sound, and any one change will only be a subtle difference.

When you really get down to it, all electric guitars sound pretty close, and the differences we hear are subtle to most non-guitar players, but big to us. The tone stacks on my amps can be adjusted to make just about any guitar sound like my others

_________________
Guitars:
1. mid 70's Ventura MIJ Gibson l6-s clone (Pre-lawsuit) in Black with Rosewood FB and EMG 81 BR/ 85 Neck
2. ESP KH2 Neck Thru
3. 2008 Am Std Strat in 3 tone sunburst

Agree, onel lane.

In the eighties, I worked for Gibson, as a regional sales rep for Michigan, and spent a lot of time in the R&D department at the old Kalamazoo plant.

I remember one of our dealers showed me an electric guitar he had made. It sounded reasonably good, and had excellent craftsmanship. And was made out of a toilet seat. He admitted that it didn't sound as nice as his Les Paul.

Now...in the eighties, Gibson was owned by Norlin, whose sole interest was: Show me the money. Most of the people involved in R&D were jazz players, and viewed solid body guitars, including the Les Paul, as toyish. I owned a 1952 Les Paul at the time, and there was no serial number on it. I asked the guys at the plant if it was a prototype, and they said, no, we didn't put serial numbers on "those things" because we didn't consider them to actually be Gibsons! Nor did they like the fact that they had the Gibson logo on them.

Note on the Les Paul:
I asked the design team about the development of the Les Paul. I suppose it's pretty widely known now, that Les Paul wasn't very hands on with the actual design. Just the idea. Gibson decided on the Mahogany body for warm tone, but found it lacking in the sustain that Les Paul insisted on. They said they tried a maple top to increase the sustain and brighten the tone. That worked. Then they tried quarter-sawn maple and found an additional slight overall improvement, but found that they couldn't use quarter-sawn and keep the guitar affordable. Compromises. They admitted that by the 70's they were turning out some crappy guitars. Les Pauls that had tops that looked like butcher blocks if you sanded off the gold paint. Tone suffered.

That attitude against solid bodies was still somewhat in effect when I worked there and used to hang out in R&D. They may have been missing the point when it came to rock and roll and the importance of solid body guitars, but THOSE GUYS KNEW WOOD AND THEY KNEW GUITARS. Do you think it was fun to see them sit around and put together a new guitar design, and then have the shop put their ideas together as a finished guitar a few days later? Duh.
They had the current arsenal of pickups to work with...P90, Dirty Fingers, etc., and they had the luxury of using a variety of woods with the same pickups. All with one goal in mind: Great Tone. They knew what worked, but unfortunately, they couldn't realize all their ideas, as the bottom line prevailed, and shortcuts, like multiple body pieces, had to be utilized. But these guys had the resources to fiddle around all day long with designs, woods, and pickups, and I was fortunate enough to see first hand what matters. You can talk about setting up your tests with identical guitars and pickups, but different woods. Sorry...been there...done that.

I was also fortunate enough to meet and hang with Larry Carlton, BB King, Howard Roberts and Chet Atkins, and Les Paul, and discuss guitar design. Carlton and Roberts knew their stuff when it came to what makes a guitar tick.

That was also the time that Gibson developed the Sonex guitar. Solid plastic body with a maple core. I thought it was an interesting concept, and asked: if the plastic's so good, why are you putting that maple core in there? They said, because without it, the guitar was too sterile sounding. And maple costs for than Sonex plastic, so they'd have left it out if they could. They were pretty crappy guitars though. There was just no way they could compete with Asia on price. I did, however, get a free chess set made out of Sonex material...each piece stood about 10" high. Great for lawn chess.

I will admit that I started at Gibson, clueless about tone woods and their effect on output. And a little bit dismissive about the importance of the wood in overall guitar tone. You don't remain clueless with the education I received at the feet of the industry masters.

Now, it matters not to me whether some chump in another state understands tone woods in guitars. I have better things to get mad about. I would however, encourage you to open up your mind a little about the effect of wood. I had often thought that the ideal guitar might be metallic and synthetic (I owned a new Kramer with the aluminum neck and synthetic fingerboard). Hey, maybe a fiberglass body or structural foam body would be cool, I thought. As it turns out though, for the tone most folks want, there's nothing like a chunk of organic tone wood, even with all its inherent downsides and inconsistencies. And there's something pretty cool about that.

Siamese,

I feel the same way. It does not really matter to me who thinks what, but I hate to see all the "over the top" posts etc. Someone new to the Strat world comes to the forum to ask a legitimate question and folks get all hot bothered about their opinion.

Regarding your history with Gibson and inside experience. It always saddens me when great companies are run by people who don't care about their product quality and tradition. Evidently Fender has gone through some similar phases. End the end they usually destroy the name and run the company in the ground.

I always wanted a LP but never could afford one. I bought an SG in 1979 and kept it for a while but never really loved it. Any way I have lost my hots for the LP. I really like the Gibson 336. It's the only one I currently covet. Their prices are too tall for me.

Thanks for your historical insights about Gibson.
OL

_________________
I remember when we were free!

This is a Epi Les Paul Custom Plus that I bought many years ago. For two years the shop where this was made used not only a beautiful maple cap not veneer but also a maple set neck instead of the mahogany on the custom pluses. The sound is amazing and it only cost $800. when bought.

_________________
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

some of you are just plain old idiots

thank you for your amusing posts, they gave me some much needed laughter

carry on.

Wow, funny thing is, when I play my Ash Strat, I sound like Steve Vai. When I play my Alder, I sound like Eric Clapton. When I play my solid Maple 335S i sound like James Hetfield, and when I play my Maple/Mahogany 335TD I sound like BB king.......so wood had to do something!!!! When I play my Flame Maple top Strat on Alder I sound like Billy Bob...... Ah, when I play my Basswood 52 Tele I sound like Keith Richards....

_________________
Xhefri's Guitars
www.xhefriguitars.com

So you are saying all these luthiers and others that say things like the following are all wrong about what the wood does. And the varies combinations that make up the whole. You never taken an assembly from one guitar and placed in another guitar and the sound is different. Lip stick pickups from a Dano don't make a Strat sound like a Dano.

Quote
Soild Body Guitar Tonewoods
Differentiating between guitar tonewoods can be frustrating. With a large variety of choices for making electric guitar bodies a luthier must do his/her homework. This guide is meant to help you choose the right wood for your guitar body blanks the first time around.

Understanding tonewood is fairly simple. Each tone wood has its own subtle characteristics. Some considerations to take into account when choosing tone wood for electric guitar bodies are the density, visual aspects, and workability of the wood. All of which affect the overall tonal qualities of the guitar body blanks you make.

The density of the guitar tonewood has a lot to do with the weight of the finished body blank, as well as how it resonates over the frequency spectrum. The visual aspects will reflect the aesthetic value of the instrument. The workability of the tone wood is how easy it is to tool and shape. How the wood excepts and secures hardware is also important. These are very important things you need to take into consideration when designing your guitar.
Alder - A common lite weight wood used on solid body guitars. It has good resonance and balanced tonal response. A strat body made with Alder will weigh around 4 pounds. The wood grain is visually similar to ash , though it has an overall darker color.

Swamp Ash - Has long been coveted for its light weight. Grown in the southern regions of the United States this tone wood has a porous composition with hard wood grains. The porous cellular structure is the reason Swamp Ash is so light. It is visually pleasing with a light buttery color and darker wood grains. This tone wood displays great tonal qualities through out the whole frequency spectrum. Many of Fenders guitars were made of this tone wood in the 50's.

Northern Ash - Has similar qualities to Swamp Ash. The biggest difference between the two is Northern Ash has a denser cell structure, resulting in the wood being a lot heavier. With the increase in density you see stronger highs.

Bass wood - Used by low end guitar manufacturers, Bass wood ia a light weight wood with tight grains and a light color. Although the higher grade pieces show a bit darker color. The softness of Bass wood is a major draw back due to durability issues, unless you add enough polymer coating to protect the surface. On the other hand the wood is easy to tool and work with. Special considerations need to be addressed when mounting hardware to the guitar body due to the tendency of screws stripping in the soft wood. The overall dynamic frequency range of this wood is somewhat lacking. This tonewood displays greater intensity on the high and low ends of the frequency spectrum with unflattering mids.
Maple - There are two different types of maple, hard maple and soft broad leaf maple. Hard is primarily used for the neck of the guitar instead of the body. Hard maple is a heavy dense wood with favorable highs and long sustain. Visually it has a very light creamy colorSoft maple has the same light creamy color of hard maple. The tonal qualities differ due to the lighter density of soft maple. This gives soft maple bright highs and strong lows.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of maple is its visually appealing characteristics. Figured maple as its called comes in several different forms and grades. The more pronounced the figuring in the grain of the wood, the higher the grade will be and the resulting price.

End quote

or the following?

Quote;
The Types of Wood, Pickups and Other Parts and How They Effect the Guitar's Sound
The types of woods make a big difference in the solid body guitar's sound. In some guitars, the body may be made primarily of one type of wood but have a different type of wood layered on top of the instrument giving it the sound chrateristic of both woods.

Alder

Alder is very popular for solid body guitar bodies because of its lighter weight and its full sound. Alder has been the mainstay for the Fender guitar and amplifier company solid guitar bodies for many years. A Fender Stratocaster alder body weighs about 4 pounds.

Ash

Ash wood comes in two types. Northern Hard Ash and Swamp Ash. Northern Hard Ash is very hard, heavy and dense. It's density contributes to a bright tone and a long sustain which makes it very popular.

Basswood

This is a lighter weight wood that produces a nice warm tone. This wood goes well with the Stratocaster type guitars.

Maple

There are two types of maple. Hard and Soft Maple. Hard Maple is a very hard, heavy and dense wood. The tone is very bright with long sustain and a lot of bite. It is usually much lighter weight than Hard Maple. It has bright tone with good bite and attack. Some guitars may have a maple top which will influence the sound but provide a visual addition if the maple is flamed or quilted and has a clear or transparent finish on the surface of the guitar. of two woods
Poplar

Poplar wood is very popular as well. It is similar to Alder in tone and is often used in some of the more economical guitars.

Rosewood

Rosewood is warmer than maple, but the highs seem to be dampened somewhat by the oily nature of the wood. One plus of a rosewood solid body electric guitar is the beauty.

_________________
The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

Thomas Jefferson

Wood makes difference. If you order the guitar without playing it first - take the consensus descriptions into account. If you have a chance to play it before you buy, and you like the tone then wood matters a lot less.

Talking Strats,most of us have played guitars using more than one piece of wood for the body since the 60s.
Let's talk about glue...